The magic of maple sugaring

Here at Colby, I think a lot about trees. It’s easy to walk in the arboretum and lose yourself in the world of tree trunks and overlapping branches, but I find myself thinking about the trees even as I’m just walking to class, or sitting in a Hillside common room, where the wide windows highlight how the white pines move and sway in the new spring wind. 

Despite all these tree-centric musings, I usually don’t have arboreal thoughts on my mind as I eat chocolate chip pancakes or orange-scented french toast from Dana. In fact, I used to pour my maple syrup on my breakfast haphazardly, throw away the little plastic container, and think nothing else of it. Now, though, as my first winter as a Mainer is coming to an end, that’s changing. 

I was first introduced to the idea of maple sugaring on campus through the Colby Outing Club (COC). The Maple Sugaring Club is an offshoot of the COC, Grace Horne `21, its organizer, explained. 

Unlike Grace, who first encountered sugaring as a child growing up in New Hampshire, I had no previous knowledge of sugaring, but when I first visited Colby’s tapping site I was enchanted by all of the small buckets hooked to the trees as sap dripped out of the trunks like leaking faucets. 

The sap was clear and not viscous at all, which was the first surprise – I had been expecting a substance closer to the syrup I knew, brown and sticky and sweet. In fact, sap is about 90% water, and it takes a lot of boiling to evaporate that water to create our familiar syrup — every gallon of maple syrup is made from around 40 gallons of sap. 

After my companions Joseph Savage, `22, Lilly Craig `24, and I emptied the tree buckets into larger trash cans full of sap, we returned them to the trees, where the dripping of sap made a satisfying clunking noise as it hit the bottom of the bucket. 

All of this is possible because of a special choreography between positive and negative pressure that goes on inside sugar maples, according to the Vermont Evaporator Company and

MapleResearch.org. All trees have water channels that they use to draw water up from their roots. These channels are surrounded by many fibrous cells. 

In most trees, these cells are full of water, so at night, when temperatures drop below freezing they expand, pushing sap out of the tree. In maple trees, these cells are full of gas, so instead when temperatures drop below freezing they condense and create a negative pressure inside the tree that draws sap up the tree. Sap then frosts on the walls of these cells, and in the morning, when temperatures rise again, this frost turns back into liquid sap and the gas cells re-expand, creating a positive pressure in the tree that pushes the sap out of any hole it can find, such as the ones tapped by our very own Colby students. The trees make more sugar through photosynthesis than they will need for energy, so losing some of their sap is not an issue. 

Native Americans were the first to discover this extraordinary feat of nature, according to “Time Magazine.” They passed their knowledge to early settlers, and later dairy farmers started selling syrup. 

Today, instead of using the bucket method like we do at Colby, most sugarers use a tube system that brings collected sap directly to a heat source that evaporates the water from the sap, making it into syrup. Here, Colby sugarers do it the old fashioned way, and they have been for years —probably longer than most of the current students have been alive.

After transferring sap from the buckets on trees to large trash cans full of sap, it is time for boiling to evaporate the water and isolate the sugars, and later, it would be time for bottling. Boiling the sap was much smokier than I anticipated, but it was exciting — you could see the sap starting to look more and more like syrup. 

In general, the whole process is very peaceful. I know I felt calmer surrounded by the maple trees, and Horne agreed, saying “I love the process of sugaring because you get to take a little break from reality. It’s impossible to stress about things when you’re hanging out in the woods.”

At the end of this process, syrup is distributed to students who helped along the way, recording their hours in an excel spreadsheet. The syrup that gets distributed in Colby dining halls, on the other hand, is all provided by True Mountain Maple, a local two-person business, Horne said. 

Also local to Maine is the tradition of Maine Maple Sunday, the fourth Sunday of March when maple sugar houses will sell anything you can imagine with maple in it, Sarah Jaroz `24 said. Jaroz has attended many a Maine Maple Sunday, which she calls “her favorite holiday.” 

On Maine Maple Sunday this year, I visited a sugarhouse and tried a maple candy for the first time, which is essentially maple syrup if it was boiled a little longer until it turned into a solid – it tasted like magic. Besides tasting good, maple syrup can also be good for you. According to the Food Network, it is high in antioxidants as well as nutrients including riboflavin, zinc, magnesium, calcium, and potassium. 

This maple magic isn’t guaranteed. Maple sugaring is only possible because of the fluctuation in positive and negative pressures, or the alternation of freezing and thawing. Advancing spring temperatures due to climate change shortens the amount of time that tapping trees is possible, meaning that we can’t take our sap gathering days for granted. 

Advocating for our environment is essential, but so is appreciating it. The next time I get syrup from Dana with my breakfast, I’ll think of the dance inside the trees that makes it all possible. 

~ Chloe Shader `24